Pyongyang the victim of latest assassination plot
Last week, North Korea made a fairly sensational allegation: that in 2014, the CIA and South Korea’s National Intelligence Service conspired to assassinate Kim Jong Un with a biochemical weapon.
In vivid detail, the North Korean Ministry of State Security described how US and South Korean officials “ideologically corrupted and bribed” a North Korean citizen working in Russia.
The plan was as follows: The alleged agent would return home to North Korea, wait for a public event, then use some kind of poisonous substance on top regime officials.
Pyongyang suggested that South Korean agents provided satellite communication equipment and money to this alleged would- be killer. The United States, according to this account, provided a biochemical substance — a delayed- action radioactive or “nano poisonous” gas.
North Korea did not offer any evidence or specifics on how the alleged plot was foiled. The suspect was identified only by his last name — Kim, which is a fairly common last name on the Korean Peninsula.
South Korean officials called the claim “groundless”. The CIA declined to comment, as is customary.
But North Korea isn’t letting it go. Last week, it said the US and South Korea should “execute” those involved in the purported plot. On Thursday, it demanded that the United States and South Korea hand over the “terror suspects”. “The Central Prosecutor’s Office will ask for the handover of those criminals and prosecute them under the relevant laws,” North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Han Song Ryol told foreign diplomats and reporters in Pyongyang, according to China’s Xinhua News Agency.
No details were included about who the suspects are and how many are on the run.
Without this information, it’s hard to evaluate Pyongyang’s allegations — or even take them very seriously.
But it’s worth noting that North Korea has a long history of its own ripped- from- a- bad- movie assassination plots. Or, as the Associated Press put it, “In the paranoid universe of North Korea, the feverish accusations it makes against its sworn enemies bear a creepy resemblance to its own misdeeds.”
There was, for example, the 1968 attempt to kill South Korea’s President. North Korea sent a 31- person commando team over the border to execute a siege on the leader’s residence. The team was discovered by some teenage brothers and never completed the mission.
In 1997, a member of Kim Jong Un’s extended family who defected was fatally shot on a South Korean street by assailants from the North.
In 2009, Pyongyang allegedly paid about US$ 40,000 ($ 58,580) to have dissident Hwang Jang Yop, secretary of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party until he defected in 1997, killed. The attempt was unsuccessful.
In 2011, a defector to South Korea suspected of being a North Korean secret agent was arrested on suspicion of attempting to assassinate Park Sang Hak, an outspoken critic of the Pyongyang regime. South Korean authorities said the suspected agent had set up a meeting with Park in a subway station in Seoul and planned to kill him with a poison pen.
And, most recently, the North Korean regime has been widely blamed for the death of Kim Jong Nam, the estranged older half- brother of Kim Jong Un.
Malaysian authorities said he was attacked by two women at the Kuala Lumpur airport; one grabbed him and the other covered his face with a cloth doused in some kind of liquid. He died on the way to the hospital. South Korea President Moon Jae In has told his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping that he’s aware of Beijing’s concerns over a United States missile shield installed on South Korean territory and will work to resolve the problem.
In their first phone conversation since his election victory this week, Moon told Xi that it may become easier to settle differences over the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence ( Thaad) system if North Korea stops its provocations, Yoon Young Chan, Moon’s senior secretary for public relations, said. The South Korean leader said he plans to send a special envoy to China to discuss Thaad and North Korea.
Moon also asked Xi to address the “restraints and restrictions” on South Korean companies doing business in China because they’re experiencing “difficulties” over the deployment, according to Yoon.
The 40- minute conversation was the first in eight months between the heads of the two nations as relations suffered after Moon’s predecessor allowed the US to install Thaad. Moon also spoke with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, with the two agreeing to co- operate closely on the North Korea issue.
US President Donald Trump has sought the help of China, South Korea and Japan in pressuring North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to halt testing of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
Moon, who was elected this week after the impeachment and ouster of Park Geun Hye, has long said the next South Korean government should review the Thaad deployment and decide to allow it only after seeking China’s understanding.